A reader writes:

Managed to get an appointment for vaccination today at a Rite Aid pharmacy. Below is the questionnaire I had to fill out.

I think many if not most medical and other forms in this country will routinely be asking for sex assigned at birth, rather than just sex, by the end of the year. These things spread very quickly.

It’s actually kind of a big deal, when mundane tasks of everyday life are inescapably permeated by this weird ideology… by a performative presumption that you may well not be sure which of your sexes to put down on these forms. My children will grow up not knowing anything different, like the third-sex half-skirted icons that now appear on public bathroom doors along side the old-fashioned icons for men and woman in many places. Sigh.

One interesting thing about this is that sex matters biologically. The pharmacy presumably needs to know what biological sex they’re dealing with here — but they can only get that information (they assume) by asking in ideological terms.

Another reader writes:

I’ve been an RN in California for 20 years and work for one of the largest hospital chains on the West Coast.

We are currently receiving our annual medical charting software update, and it is quite amazing.

The biological sex of a patient will no longer be referred to, instead there will be “legal sex” and an “organ inventory”. For example:

Patient Legal Sex: Male

Organ Inventory: Breasts, Ovaries, Uterus, Vagina

I’m not kidding. It’s only a matter of time until your Drivers License will look like this.

Keep up the good fight Rod, and perhaps someday Sanity will prevail. If you choose to publish this please leave out my name, as I am certain my job would be jeopardized if it were published.

This is genuinely chilling. Think of how inhuman it is: “organ inventory” — as if men and women were nothing more than a conglomeration of meat.

How can anyone have loyalty to a corrupt and decadent civilization that proclaims these lies as true? What evil are we accepting?

In the Boston Review, two physicians explain their new “antiracist agenda” for medicine, which they are going to implement in their hospital. Excerpts:

For both of these reasons, we believe antiracist institutional change is essential to supplement federal reparations. If we are serious about achieving equity—both now and after federal reparations are paid—we must also pursue institutional action. Crucial to this work is a pragmatic orientation to what philosopher Naomi Zack calls “applicative justice”—“applying justice to those who don’t now receive it”—as opposed to more idealistic conceptions of justice, whether derived from John Rawls or John Locke, on which some arguments for reparations are based.

This is exactly what we have tried to achieve in the design our new pilot initiative at Brigham and Women’s Hospital set to launch later this spring. Adapting Darity’s reparations framework of acknowledgment, redress, and closure (ARC) to an institutional level, we have designed a program—we call it a Healing ARC—with initiatives for all three components. Each centers Black and Latinx patients and community members: those most impacted by unjust heart failure management and under whose direction appropriate restitution can begin to take shape.

If it sounds to you like they are justifying discriminating against white people in the delivery of medical care, well, you’re right — but see, they’re doing it for Social Justice™. More:

Sensitive to these injustices, we have taken redress in our particular initiative to mean providing precisely what was denied for at least a decade: a preferential admission option for Black and Latinx heart failure patients to our specialty cardiology service. The Healing ARC will include a flag in our electronic medical record and admissions system suggesting that providers admit Black and Latinx heart failure patients to cardiology, rather than rely on provider discretion or patient self-advocacy to determine whether they should go to cardiology or general medicine. We will be analyzing the approach closely for the first year to see how well it works in generating equitable admissions. If it does, there will be good reason to continue the practice as a proven implementation measure to achieve equity.

I look forward to the lawsuits. I cannot imagine how this could be legal under the US Constitution — that  Lockean document.

In fact, the World Socialist Web Site — seriously — says it is both unethical and illegal. Excerpt:

The underlying ideology behind the attempt to impose race-based health care is known as “critical race theory,” which holds that social inequality is caused by white racism against “people of color.” Critical race theory obscures the basic source of inequality—class society. The so-called “Public Health Critical Race Framework” has emerged in direct opposition to modern medical practice.

The basic tenet of this theory is that if one is the correct “color,” one is entitled to preferential treatment. This is a right-wing position, which explicitly denounces calls for unity across racial lines in a struggle for quality health care for all. It is a position with which white supremacists can agree, differing only on which “color” receives preferential treatment. And if race can be used to determine care for heart disease, what about other medical procedures, i.e., bypass surgery or dialysis? What about vaccinations for COVID-19?

From this “framework” flows the claim that the underlying problem in health care is “structural racism,” and the only solution is for Brigham’s and other hospitals to carry out reparations, termed “medical restitution,” to those deemed to have suffered from the hospital’s supposed unjust practices. According to the Boston Review authors, such restitution would involve at the very least “cash transfers and discounted or free care,” and be expanded to the federal level to include “taxes on nonprofit hospitals that exclude patients of color and race-explicit protocol changes.”

Using this outlook, representatives of the ruling class, and particularly those in and around the Democratic Party, are creating the fiction that the catastrophic health care situation facing the working population is not due to the decades of bipartisan social counterrevolution at the behest of Wall Street, including the mass defunding and privatization of public health care networks, but to inherent racial prejudices against all African Americans.

Obviously I don’t agree that racism is a “right-wing position,” nor do I agree with much of this socialist analysis. Still, it is really interesting to see actual socialists standing up against this neoracism.

Take a look at this essay by a doctor writing on the Journal of the American Medical Association Network, about vaccine inequity. She notes, accurately, that black communities are hesitant to take vaccines in part because of past abuses (e.g., the Tuskegee Experiment). But notice this creepy language:

Those of us who work in and with historically marginalized communities see strong evidence that equality does not equal equity. Equality means giving everyone the exact same resources, whereas equity involves distributing resources based on the needs of the recipients. Giving everyone equal access (eg, through online scheduling) has exacerbated inequities in vaccine uptake. When you prioritize equality over equity, you get the results we have seen throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Disparities grow wider and wider when we consider unequal access to broadband and internet, computers, time to visit online vaccine distribution sites to find an appointment, and the ability to drive hours across county and state lines for an appointment. We must develop and use strategies that provide equitable (not only equal) solutions to address the disparities we are witnessing.

She says later that communities of color should receive preferential medical treatment — a horrible idea, and a racist one. What is somewhat unnerving to me is the insistence on “equitable solutions.” At what point does human agency enter into the picture? A recent poll in my state showed that 40 percent of Louisiana Republicans do not want to take the Covid vaccine. If you are a Republican in Louisiana, there is an overwhelming likelihood that you are white. I think it’s foolish not to take the vaccine (I’m not a registered Republican, but I am a political conservative, and I took the shot), but I also believe that people have the right to make the decision for themselves, whatever their race. What’s to stop these “equity” obsessives from devising programs in which people are compelled to submit to vaccines, or other medical interventions, to satisfy abstract quotas?

If you want to know where else the Great Awokening of medicine is going, read this piece in Quillette, based on interviews the author, Angus Fox (a pseudonym to protect himself from cancellation), did with parents of minors who have been sucked into the gender transformation maelstrom. I’m going to do a separate post on this, but notice this passage:

This story is familiar to many parents with whom I’ve spoken. They call the phenomenon “institutional capture”: healthcare practitioners are either indoctrinated with absolutist beliefs about gender identity that would have been seen as radical until just a few years ago, or are so terrified of running afoul of affirmation dogmas that they simply refer patients on to someone else. As a result, Christine’s trust in the medical profession has collapsed. “In California, you have no power,” she tells me.

But it isn’t just in California, I’ve learned. All across the English-speaking world, many of the professionals to whom parents have turned for guidance now appear to have embraced priorities that diverge from the well-being of the children they treat. Rational analysis is out; gender justice is in.

In some ways, Christine and Max’s story is typical: a gifted boy with the common comorbidities of trans presentation (in this case, depression and ADHD) suddenly presenting himself as dysphoric in a way that a parent struggles to interpret as authentic. In other ways, the case is atypical: Max is conventionally athletic, for example, a characteristic that rarely correlates. But this phenomenon of institutional capture is a universal element in the stories I’ve heard. Christine uses the word “blindsided” to describe her reaction to the manner by which professionals seem to have all been enlisted in the same cultish outlook. A hyper-relativist interpretation of anything pertaining to gender is now simply ubiquitous in clinics and therapeutic practices. And while there may be plenty of therapists and doctors who disagree with it, few have the courage to speak out openly.

From Live Not By Lies:

A Soviet-born US physician told me—after I agreed not to use his name—that he never posts anything remotely controversial on social media, because he knows that the human resources department at his hospital monitors employee accounts for evidence of disloyalty to the progressive “diversity and inclusion” creed.

That same doctor disclosed that social justice ideology is forcing physicians like him to ignore their medical training and judgment when it comes to transgender health. He said it is not permissible within his institution to advise gender dysphoric patients against treatments they desire, even when a physician believes it is not in that particular patient’s health interest.

This is not happening in the USSR, where medicine was notoriously abused for ideological reasons. This is happening in the USA. We are in the grips of a civilizational madness. More and more, I meet people who seem desperate to deny the severity of what’s happening. They want to believe that everything is going to be okay.

It’s not going to be okay. The politruks (political commissars) have captured the institutions.